


We Had It in the Air (We Just Couldn't Land It)

by mrsvc



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: Angst, Break Up, Episode Related, F/M, Leave It to Beavers, M/M, it's only nick/monroe if you squint, juliette is a badass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-29
Updated: 2012-04-29
Packaged: 2017-11-04 13:30:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/394418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrsvc/pseuds/mrsvc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Juliette loves Nick. Nick may have doubted it a little, after she had turned down his proposal, but she really does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Had It in the Air (We Just Couldn't Land It)

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd. Title from "Over When It's Over" by Eric Church.

"I'm going to go talk to your nurse, see it we can't get you out of here," Juliette says, kissing him gently.

Nick grimaces, repositions his newly broken leg on the pillow, and is already fighting the urge to itch under the plaster. "Thank you."

As soon as she passes outside of the curtain, she can hear him rummaging among the sheets. She waits for a moment, just to make sure he's not trying to get out of bed, and breathes a sigh of relief when she hears him dialing a number on his phone. He's probably just calling in to work.

Trying to catch his nurse was like trying to catch a loose snake, her running to and fro between curtained rooms and getting called over by doctors to sign off on orders, but Juliette catches her attention long enough for the nurse to call over, "if you give me five minutes, I'll get his paperwork."

Juliette nods, and stands just outside of Nick's bed, hoping to serve as a reminder to the nurse. She hears Nick mumbling to someone on the phone. "You don't need to come, Monroe, I told you."

Juliette's ears perk. She feels a little guilty, eavesdropping on this conversation, but her guilt is assuaged when she remembers how they had sat at her dining room table and bald-faced lied to her. She would expect his first call to have been Hank, or the station, to let them know. Instead, he's apparently telling his private investigator-somewhat friend not to come visit him in the hospital. She wasn't stupid. Any assumption she had that Monroe was some kind of deeply undercover civilian informant was thrown right out of the window.

"Juliette's going to take me home, as soon as the nurse comes back. I'll leave the door unlocked, you can come over tomorrow. No, I broke my leg." Nick sounds sheepish, even through the curtain, and she can't imagine Monroe's response to that. "Yeah, I know. I know it leaves me vulnerable. I'm not a cripple, damn it. I took him out, Monroe. Yeah, I know. I know. I'll see you tomorrow?" She hears him throw the phone down on the sheets and she takes the chance to slip around the curtains.

"Was that Hank?" she asks, sitting in the chair at his bedside again.

"Oh, yeah," he fiddles with his phone some more, almost as if he's afraid she'll pick it up and check his story. "He laughed at me, the traitor. As if he has never gotten hurt in pursuit."

She smiles, because she's hurt, and only relaxes when the nurse comes charging in, brandishing a stack of discharge papers and a pen at them.

\-----

Juliette loves Nick. Nick may have doubted it a little, after she had turned down his proposal, but she really does. She loves the way he thinks he can fix everything with the force of his conviction. She loves his blue eyes, and his sense of purpose in life. She loves that he loves; that he puts 100% of himself into his job everyday. She used to love that he was honest, and trustworthy, and forthcoming with her. She had thought that she'd known everything there was to know about him, that his friends were her friends, that they had successfully fused two lives together into one.

Instead, he has friends that she meets after having to practically bribe him into it. He disappears for hours at a time, coming home later and later, with nothing to say to her other than it was the nature of his job. She's known Detective Nick Burkhardt since he'd gotten the badge. He was foolish if he thought that she didn't already know the nature of his job.

She's driving to work when her cell phone rings. She pulls over to the side of the road and digs it out of her purse, answering it on the third ring. "Hey, Hank," she sighs, fiddling with the radio in her car.

"How's our boy?"

"Oh, you know," she frowns slightly. "I left him whining on the couch, with a bag of chips and a DVR full of soap operas."

"He sure does love his stories," Hank jokes back, both of them knowing Nick was probably brooding at home, doing back-logged police paperwork at the kitchen table. "So, he's not coming into today?"

"He didn't tell you yesterday?" She knows Nick didn't talk him yesterday. She's using it as a segway into what she really wants to ask him.

"I haven't talked to him. I tried calling his cell, but he didn't pick up."

"Maybe he's talking to Monroe." The silence on the other end of the line answers all her questions, but she carries on. "You've met him, right?"

"Well, yeah," Hank says, and she can hear his apprehension. "But when did you?"

"We had dinner the other night."

"You invited clock guy over for dinner?" Hank snorts, and she can almost hear the laughter in his voice. "You know how I met him?" She doesn't say anything. "The first time was when we arrested him for kidnapping a little girl."

"Nick told me," she lies. She's not a gossip, even if he is bringing up her misgivings with Hank early on a Tuesday morning. "They're good friends, now. Monroe saved my life when I was taken by the fire dancer."

"Monroe was there?" Hank asks, suddenly intrigued. "Nick didn't mention that to me."

"Hank-"

"You know, Monroe was in the room when I woke up in Adalind's house."

They sit on the phone for a moment, both thinking about everything they know, and the ever-increasing amount that they don't. The sun is hot and harsh through her windows, her air conditioning just a mild breeze comparatively, and the announcers on the radio wanted her to call in now to win tickets to see Eric Church in concert. She needs to buy gas on the way home, and she's already ten minutes late to opening her practice.

"You don't think-"

"He's got himself mixed up in something?" Hank finishes for her. "This is Nick. If he has," Hank pauses, not wanting to entertain the notion anymore than she does, "then he probably has a good reason. He never does anything just because it's the thing to be done, Juliette."

"I'm late to work," she says after a moment. "I'll call you later, Hank. You should come by for dinner sometime. Monroe's a vegan, so I couldn't make him my famous herb pork chops."

She hangs up without waiting for his reply.

\-----

Things are back to normal during Nick's recuperation. He's honest, and open, and everything she remembered from what felt like too many years ago now. She feels bad that she dreads the day that his cast comes off, but as he walks out of the office without his crutches, she knows it's all going to change back now. No more early nights on the couch watching movies, no more dinners in, and no more mornings that seemed to last for days. He had already been riding desk jockey for weeks, and now that he was back to active duty, he already has some of his old swagger back in his step.

She gets two days' peace before he gets a call.

It's just another case, and he comes home three days later, bruised and sore, complaining about his leg hurting. She spends most of her time at work when he's gone. She's not the only vet in her practice, but she is a senior partner, and she's still pulling hours like an intern. She likes the people there, and she loves animals, so it doesn't feel like work for her. It feels like an extension of herself, and she doesn't regret all those years she spent busting her ass through two jobs and college to get to where she is now. She tries telling herself that Nick is just as passionate about being a cop as she is about being a vet, and tries reminding herself that that was what drew her to him in the first place.

She's pretty good at lying to other people, but she never managed to work out how to lie to herself.

They fall into a pattern that is everything Juliette was afraid of: Nick is cagey and secretive again, sending hours at the station, and he still receives strange gifts and phone calls. She catches the plumber shaking Nick's hand out in the driveway one night, looking up at him like he's a god or his hero, and Nick patting his shoulder generously. She intercepts a woman named Rosalee leaving a Manila envelope in their mailbox, but when she asks her what's she's doing, the woman just tells her, "it's for Nick." 

She thinks about opening it for hours, except she's not that kind of person. The only time she had jumped to conclusions had been when the fire dancer had all but thrown herself in Juliette's face and dared her to step back. She sets the envelope in the hallway table, glancing at it like she expects it to come alive and tell her its secrets. When she shows it to Nick, flipping a hand at it over her back as if she hadn't been obsessed with it since it was dropped off, he scoops it up like it's Christmas morning and tells her it's a "break in a case he's been waiting on." He opens it and reads it with a growing smile on his face. It only takes a second before he runs back out the door, with a kiss to her cheek, and he takes the envelope with him. He's already on the phone as he backs out of their driveway, and she watches him speed down their street from the living room window.

It's six months before Nick gets himself put in the hospital again. She drives there in a fugue, not remembering much of anything from the drive over. It's the hospital that calls her and tells her, which doesn't shock her because the man on the phone says that Nick's in surgery for a stab wound. What does surprise her, though, is that it's Monroe shaking the surgeon's hand. The doctor is still wearing a blue paper hat and protective coverings on his shoes. She can see blood, what she assumes is Nick's, on his pants, and there's a mask hanging loose around his neck. He's smiling and patting Monroe on the back, since he looks like he's going to pass out, or possibly cry. The doctor walks away, ripping the mask and hat off and stuffing them in the trash, and Monroe goes into the room she assumes is Nick's. She edges closer, making sure to stay just outside the door, and listens. The glass doors to the ICU don't do much for espionage, but the curtain is partially pulled and she pulls her phone out, hoping the nurses will ignore her.

"Fucking rhinoceroses," she hears Nick groan.

Monroe laughs. The only thing she can see inside the room is the bump in the sheets where Nick's feet are, and Monroe's back as he settles on the edge of Nick's bed. "Someday, you are going to learn not to push a Dickfellig's buttons."

"I'm a cop; pushing buttons is, like, our job." He sounds a little lucid than normal, and she imagines the anesthesia is still making him foggy.

Monroe changes the subject, and Juliette can see where he's raised his arm to brush the hair out of Nick's eyes. "I asked the nurse. She said you might be on solids by tomorrow, if everything goes well and the doctor writes the order. I'm going to bring you your favorite, because I have had hospital food, dude. It's atrocious. It's where good, nutritious food goes to die. It's totally counter-intuitive, if you ask me. If you can't eat healthy in a place where you are suppose to get healthy-"

"Shut up, Monroe." She can hear the loopy smile rather than see it.

Monroe nods, and says, almost too quietly for Juliette to hear from outside, but she strains for it and catches, "not allowed to die."

"Goes both ways, asshole."

The lights out at the nurses' station flicker, and a voice floats over the PA telling everyone that visiting hours are over. It doesn't matter to Juliette, though, because she's already out the door.

\-----

Nick's allowed to have friends. Juliette has work people that she goes out to lunch with every day, who email her funny pictures of cats, and ask her out for drinks on Wednesdays when an emergency keeps them running on adrenaline for hours and they all need to unwind and talk to someone who understands. Nick has Hank, and Wu, and the rookies down at the station. They go out for beer and catch baseball games on the weekends. He gets chain texts about stupid criminals and sometimes gets the same stupid car pictures she does from different people. They aren't that co-dependent couple who can't go anywhere without each other. Juliette doesn't mind that Nick has new friends, like Bud, and Monroe, and Rosalee. She counts Rosalee among Nick's friends when she meets her again in town, locking up a little spice shop late at night. She calls her by name, and traps her with a friendly smile.

"Did everything go okay with that case you and Nick were working on?"

Rosalee's smile gets tight, and uncomfortable, but she says, "yes. Just happy to be of help. Nick did so much for me when my brother was killed. He didn't have to, but he did."

Juliette has two thoughts at the same time: she remembers Nick telling her about this case, the tea shop owner gunned down for some drugs he sold in the back of his shop, and that this woman had called him Nick. "That's just like Nick," Juliette laughs. "He always goes above and beyond." She means it, too, because it touches her heart to know that that part of Nick hasn't changed, even if everything else about him has. "If you need anything, you know where we live." Rosalee's smile softens at that, and they shake hands.

Nick is allowed to have friends, because he doesn't need Juliette's permission to do anything. She just wishes that they were friends he could share with her without having to lie.

\-----

She finds Monroe's jacket and a woman's necklace in the trunk of their car next week. She doesn't even want to know why any more.

\-----

When it happens, Juliette is washing the dishes. She isn't really thinking about anything, just humming an old song under her breath, until she wonders if the house is in her name or Nick's. She starts thinking about entwined their finances are and wonders whose name is on their bank accounts as the primary holder. She feels a weight lift off her shoulders when she remembers that the house is Nick's, but the car is her's, and that makes her drop the plate she washing right into the water. 

She has already left him in her mind, even as she washed the dishes they had ate dinner off of last night, before he went to bed in an effort to get some needed shut-eye after his first day back on the job after his surgery. 

She can remember moving into this house, too many years ago now to count. Nick had bought the house when he was in college and shared it with a bunch of his police academy buddies. He had put it in his name, and then had all of them pay their rent to him to pay off his credit card. They all moved on, and moved out, and Nick stayed on right there in that house. He told her, once, what it was like to grow up with Aunt Marie. 

“She was never around, and we moved a lot. New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Kansas, Chicago, Denver. We carved a set path out west. By the time I was 17, we hit Portland, and I told her I’d like to graduate in the high school I attended for more than six months. She left me here.”

“That’s terrible!” she had said, wrapped around him on the couch. 

“Not really,” he shrugged. “I got an apartment, and got accepted to the police academy. I took some classes in Criminal Justice and made my way through the ranks. Bought a house, met a pretty girl.”

She had blushed, as she always did when Nick complimented her, and snuggled into his shoulder.

She had understood, then, that Nick was a putting-down-roots type. When she moved in, his house had been livable, but a little too sparse and barren. It was exactly like a bachelor who had never had a proper home would decorate, and she’d loved it. She started to place her little touches on it, a new curtain rod here, a new bedspread there. Nick had never mentioned it, other than to look at her new purchases with a fond smile and a kiss to her temple. They had a guest room, a master bedroom, and one of those fancy living rooms no one was ever supposed to go in. Nick paid his mortgage like it was a privilege, and she kept her car in her name. It hadn’t been a conscious decision, but now that she’s thought about it, it was a good one. 

She reaches into the tepid dishwater and pulls the plate back out. She remembers buying it, just a cheap set of china plates that came in a box from a big retail department store, but she’d put them up like they were the finest bone china and Nick was scared of scraping them with his silverware for a week. The one in her hand is covered in little grey knife marks from too many good meals to remember or forget, and she notices a brand new chip on the edge from where she’d dropped it.

She throws it against the wall and has to spend the next hour cleaning up the pieces. 

\-----

Nick brings home wine a week later, as an apology for forgetting her birthday. It's a fancy white wine that seems like something you'd buy direct from a winery, and not the drug store. She pulls out their wine glasses and they cuddle up on the couch with some stupid show muted in the background.

"I'm so sorry I missed your birthday," he says. God, he's so earnest, it breaks Juliette's heart. She loves him, so much it's starting to actually hurt her, and tears form in the corners of her eyes. She's been with Nick so long that she's forgotten how to do this. She frames his face in her hands, draws in a shuddering breath, and says, "I forgive you" and "I'm sorry, too."

He cocks his head to the side, confused, and uses his thumb to wipe the tears from her cheeks. "What do you have to be sorry about?"

"I don't think I can do this any more, Nick. I can't take you lying to me everyday. I feel-" She pauses and breathes again. His hands dropped in his lap when she started to talk, and she sees them clenched into weak fists on his knees. "I feel like a stranger in your life now."

He doesn't denying the lying, which she almost wants to thank him for, because that would just insult her intelligence. He avoids looking at her, though, and she keeps her eyes rolled up towards the ceiling in an attempt to keep from sobbing brokenly on his shoulder about it. "I want to tell you the truth," he says, "but you wouldn't believe it."

"I'd tell you to try me," she starts, but she had lost the fight a long time, and about four lies, ago. "Where'd the wine come from?"

Nick smiles, tight and wiry, and says, "Monroe."

"I figured as much," she nods to herself, thinking about everything she's learned since that dinner. "He's really changed your taste in things." It's a dirty jab, a rabbit punch to the gut, but she thinks she deserves one.

"That's not fair, Juliette. It was never like that. We work cases together, and we're, we're friends. Don't think for one second that I don't love you anymore, because that is not true. I love you, more than anything. I love you so much that I didn't want you to be affected by..." he fades out and makes an expansive gesture.

"Except that I was." Nick has nothing to say to that. He hangs his head in mute acceptance, and she stands. "I'm sleeping in the guest room tonight. Think about what I said."

She's not all that surprised that Nick leaves as soon as she goes upstairs.

\-----

On the day she moves out, Nick stays home from work. He turns his phone on silent and ignores, probably, twenty calls from Hank. He leaves when he sees her packing up her clothes and comes back twenty minutes later carrying a heavy book under his arm. She's shoving the last of her old college textbooks onto the floor of her passenger seat when he holds it out to her.

"It's all here. Everything I've been doing, everything Aunt Marie died for, what my parents died for, everything Monroe and Rosalee knows." He holds it out with one hand and she can see his wrist tremble from the weight. "If you want to know, here it is."

She takes the book and examines it slowly. It's old, the pages thin and yellowed with age, and she can smell the musky vanilla scent of aged paper. The leather covering is worn soft, and she feels the cracks in the spine where it has laid open for hours at a time. "It's too late," she says, refusing to open it. "Whatever is in here isn't going to change anything, and it's probably better that I don't know."

"Juliette-"

"You have always kept me safe, Nick." She sets the book on top of her car and hugs him. By the fact that he doesn't shy away from her touch, she figures he's known this was coming for a long time. He holds her, hard and fast to his body, and she lets him have this one last embrace. She steps away from him. "Maybe when this is over...?" she says uncertainly, filling his now empty hands with the book.

He shakes his head. "It will never be over, not while I'm still breathing." She remembers that his whole family had died for what is in that book, and she's scared to even think about what's in there that could only end with his death. She's suddenly glad he's got people to watch his back, people who already know about whatever he's struggling through.

"Goodbye, Nick. Stay safe?"

He nods, swallowing hard like he can't quite get his throat to work properly, and pats the top of her car when she puts it into reverse.

\-----

It’s only four months later when she gets another call. The hospital, asking for Juliette Silverton, and they are very sorry to inform her that Nick Burkhardt has been brought into the emergency department again. She throws on some yoga pants and a sweater and drives to the hospital. She had stayed with her sister for two weeks after the break-up, a sort of therapy money can’t buy, while she apartment-hunted, and moved into her own condo shortly after. She was only a few minutes away from the hospital from there, and she knew she needed to go and see him. 

Nick’s not in the ICU this time. He’s got a bad concussion and lost consciousness, but his scans are clear and the doctor is releasing him to go home as soon as the papers are signed. She gets all this from a little white haired nurse that she recognizes from at least one trip in here before. She smiles kindly when Juliette asks to go around the curtain, and says, “he’s one of our favorite frequent flyers, the good detective is,” before motioning for Juliette to follow her in. 

“Juliette? They called you?” he says it while holding a weeping baggie of ice to a cut on his forehead, and she almost laughs at him. 

“Apparently, you haven’t changed your contact information,” she says kindly, dropping her purse on the floor and sitting in the chair next to his bed.

“I’m so sorry, it’s got to be, what? Three in the morning?”

The nurse, who had been fiddling on the computer, turns around and smiles, “well, at least you know what time it is,” before she drops a familiar stack of papers on the bedside table and walks Nick through them. He signs them, barely finishing his name before she plucks the pen out of his hand and turns to Juliette, “are you taking him home?”

She opens her mouth to ask Nick what his plans are, when Monroe skids to a halt in the opening of the curtain. “Looks like his ride’s already here,” she smiles at the nurse. Nick has the tact to look a little sheepish, but Monroe’s frowning at him and in less of an amendable mood than she’s ever seen him. She pats Nick on the hand and breezes past Monroe. She figures Nick’s got a little explaining to do, from the way he looked at her when she glanced over her shoulder, and she decides to wait for them out in the parking lot. 

They come out five minutes later, four of which Juliette assumes involved an argument over whether or not Nick would be coming out in a wheelchair, and she watches Monroe stuff Nick into his Bug, already half asleep. “You’ve got him from here, right?” she yells over. They were only three cars over, and she could see the difference in Monroe’s expression from the light of the streetlamps. He looks happy and soft, swinging his keys back and forth on his fingers, and she smiles when he brings himself to meet her eyes. 

“Yeah, I think I do.”

“Good,” she says, waving goodbye. Monroe waves back, a little awkward just like always, and shoves himself into the driver’s seat of his little car. Nick waves at her too, as they back out, and she knows they did the right thing, for both of them.


End file.
